


Still,

by Ivy_in_the_Garden



Category: Cain Saga and Godchild
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Existential Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Missing Scene, Trauma, Very brief mention of violence to animals, grim, please heed the warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-26 18:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17751368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ivy_in_the_Garden/pseuds/Ivy_in_the_Garden
Summary: What Cassian did after Delilah. Because there was an after.





	Still,

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the warnings: this is not a happy fic, because Cassian did not have a happy fate.

  1. **Still**



There weren't any last words, not any that he could count. It's not that he doesn't know death, not like he hasn't been the source of it. 

But he's never looked down with horror and regret at what he had done. Or in this case, hasn’t done. He's never contemplated the weight of his own consequences, but here they are now, the product of a lifetime of inaction, pooling onto the concrete like a missed thought. 

He hadn't anticipated the spray of blood; he thinks of spitting out the droplets that fell into his mouth, open, aghast, wetting his tongue, but that seems like sacrilege now.  _Sick_. What a sick thought now. Sacrilege here of all places—one man's temple to himself, and like all temples, it eroded. 

People push past him in the chaos, but he carries on, following only the hollowness of his own heart. He needs somewhere to lay down his cross, somewhere to wash off the cooling blood on his throat and chest, a facsimile of the real wound on the real corpse. 

He's taller, the kid smaller, paler and dour, but that's just the view. Nothing is really different.

The road is still, the sky still, the crowds still in their heaving terror.

He picks his way through the afterthoughts of back roads in London, raised cobblestone giving way to dirt--as it always does. Towards the river, towards the church on the hill like a sentinel. Just as he begins to choose his path, he turns back, unable to see his decision to the end, because at the end, his cross will be taken away and he will be himself again. The dreams will leave with the body.

* * *

 2.  **Twenty-Seven**

It's all wrong. He lays himself down on a bare pew, a crucified Jesus looming at the front, all wooden grace. Silence ebbs in the cold church, as Cassian rests his head on his arm, refusing the rough pillow brought out for him.

There's only so much mercy and pity he can accept from strangers. 

Now with the body tucked into his greatcoat, away from him, resting in some backroom with the rest of the ghosts, Cassian cannot help but reckon their ages over and over again. It was all wrong. The kid should not be dead. He should have had more time. There was enough time. The kid would live, and he, well, he didn't care if he died. And then it was mixed up. 

He can't remember what he was at twenty-seven, other than seething with rage and hunger. 

There's something missing in the darkness, like a string which, pulled too taut, snaps. Something that should have lasted. It's almost tangible: if he reaches out, he could find it. 

(What does anyone know at twenty-seven, anyway? And now all that Jezabel had seen and known was simply gone, including how ever Cassian had appeared to him. Cassian doesn't know what to make of that strange, puzzled look he gave him as he died, as if seeing Cassian for the first time.)

Cassian half wants to shake Jezabel awake from his dreamless state to demand some answers, but it's not as though he'd get any. No, there's just more of the silence that has always plagued him.

He imagines Jezabel there, beside him, unstained and bored, leaning back against the centuries-old woodcarvings of the pew with his arms crossed. Or perhaps he would rather be sullenly attentive, his back straight, staring ahead. Or was there something else that Cassian has lost about him? Did that black cross 'round his neck signify some morbid devotion? 

 But even in his own imaginings, he cannot get Jezabel to speak to him; he only stares ahead, devout or bored, pained or dismissive.

"Kid," Cassian begins, wetting his lips, but there's no one.

There's no one.

And it hits him that Jezabel is gone, that there will forever be a gap between them: him, the unwitting survivor, and the kid, the dead kid. 

Cassian raises himself off the pew, suddenly conscious of being alone. There isn't anyone left to rescue, no plans to play and replay in his head until he found the courage to act, no one to be saved. There isn't anybody left, just Cassian in his oversized body and a cooling corpse in the backroom. 

Terror and desperation burns at his throat: he doesn't want Jezabel to be alone there, in that cold, empty room. That seems unkind, like a refusal of his duty! His body aches as he leaves the pew, stumbling towards the backroom and then he stops, afraid of what he might find there, as if he has not carried the corpse himself, his arms numb and twitching under the strain. 

"From the calamity?" the old priest had asked a bit sadly, gazing down at the pale, drained body. 

And Cassian had let the old man believe what he wanted: there had been chaos at the tower, fights and threats and violence. It was a murder, not a suicide, because one of those gets a grave and the other gets an unmarked hole at the crossroads. It was a murder. It could have been. 

That was the trick.

That had always been the trick.

 (In retrospect, fear chills Cassian at the possibility that it could have all gone wrong and that he might be blamed for Jezabel's death.)

The door sticks a little, before Cassian shoves it open, his heart loud. And he's there, on the table where Cassian left him, alone in the room without even a window to look out of. Tomorrow will be the burial, and then there will be no more reaching him. 

Cassian strokes the curve of his face gently, bolder now in the futility of the gesture. "Kid," he says, but all he can see is the flesh giving way and all that made the kid recognizable will be gone in the bones, in the ground. He can't even hold onto that. 

And then, all that will remain is Cassian and a headstone, and then just a headstone. An incomplete headstone, because Cassian doesn't even know when the kid was born. Jezabel wasn't really the type to celebrate birthdays.

He tries to close the kid's mouth, open slightly, lending the kid a vulnerable look, but the muscles have already begun to stiffen, and dread fills Cassian's stomach. Already, it's beginning. Soon, the kid will be tucked away in some plain cotton sheets and underground, and he doesn't know how the kid is supposed to breathe underground.

* * *

 3.  **Old Friend**

He doesn't look up from the ground when it's time. A hole in the woods, a few prayers, a cheap, pale coffin. Because there are so many more deaths to attend, and the graveyard with its stone walls seemed too stifling. But Cassian tries to make the funeral special, because, Christ, who else will! When the priest is gone, he puts his hand on the upturned soil and tells the kid not to be afraid of the soil, to put in a good word for him. 

And he lapses into a pained smile, because the kid has always thought he loved death. He has never been afraid of the end; that was the problem, after all. No, this is for himself, not the kid. 

He's offered a job taking care of the grounds, and Cassian already knows that it's pity behind this offer but he takes it anyway, because he's a coward. 

And he can't keep leaving the kid.

And there are sunrises and sunsets, and the world keeps on. And people go by, and weddings and baptisms and deaths, more deaths. Cassian becomes old, for the first time in his life. One day, he recognizes the girl he once kidnapped and tried to kill, the kid-sister of the earl, in the papers, now all grown into a sad sort of beauty, sad even on her wedding day, keeping other people's promises. And it's strange that their paths cross, and he knows that she, like him, is waiting for a return that will not happen. 

And he wonders if the boy-earl would have gone to his own death so willingly if he knew what his kid-sister would become in his absence.

He cleans, he tidies, he sows, God reaps. 

He clears, he plants, he tends, God reaps.

He builds, he mends, he sweeps, and still, still—.

And just like that, a lifetime is gone, strung together by a collection of littler lifetimes.

And Jezabel, as always, has not given Cassian a sign that he's alright, although Cassian doesn't know why he thought he'd get such consideration. 

He lets the wild bunnies creep along the headstone, here in the woods where human voices do not carry. Then he lies down beside it, his back dampening from the rotting leaves. 

It's quiet here. 

Something stumbles out of the overgrowth. Cassian raises himself on an elbow in bemusement. It's a poor half-grown stray, a cat with a tuff of fur missing from its foreleg, as if someone had burned it with a cigarette. And just like that, he can hear Jezabel giving him a furious diatribe about the sinfulness of the human race, 

He knows it's just luck that this creature made its way to him, but from the right angle, luck can look a lot like fate. 

Cassian crouches beside it, fishing in his pocket for some appeasement. He finds a broken length of twine and dangles it in front of the newcomer. It hesitates, wary of him, but then lunges for the string, forgetting itself, a kitten again. 

It's not Jezabel. 

It's a new life.

And he hopes that where ever Jezabel is, that there is some measure of peace. His heart aches in that thought, because the ache never went away. But he offers a few pats to the cat all the same. 

"Why don't you come back with me?" he says.

It purrs, rubbing against him. 

Cassian forgets about his guilt sometimes. 

**Author's Note:**

> Cassian feels just hit me like a wrench to the heart. This came out of a prompt by hidoimurasaki about Cassian and "at the edge of consciousness". And I loosely interpreted that because that's what I do. Thank you for reading. I hope you're not too sad now.


End file.
